Doodles in the margin from an artist living and working in the Scottish Borders.

Friday, 10 December 2010

Fail Better

I caught this last night by accident, and it was serendipitous, given my own perennial fretful brainfizzings and the recent sacking of Chris Hughton.

It's screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce's talk The Joy of Failure on Radio 3's Night Waves. His thesis is that failure is not something to be fearful of, rather that progress (and Post-It Notes) depend on mistakes.

"Is this pathology-ward level cheering and waving really encouragement? Or is it a strange new morbid dread of failure? Boyce ... makes a passionate plea for the traditional enemies of happiness - error, disappointment and, above all, failure. Bad ideas have often led to great discoveries, he claims, and human knowledge is dependent on our ability to continue making mistakes."